THE STACK

You have the unenviable task of assembling the bookcase that you bought and have left in the middle of your living room since it was delivered more than a month ago. You quickly realize that the instructions which say that the entire bookcase can be assembled with a single screwdriver is way beyond your mechanical prowess. You go online and start a chat conversation with the customer services department, and when the agent asks which bookcase you are asking about and what your order number is, your mind goes blank, and the only thing you can type is “The #$%$^ one that I cannot assemble.”

However, as with any technology, advancements happen at a rapid pace. This guide of Tips and Insights is designed to assist organizations who are looking at improving adoption and efficiency of their contact center solution.

One of the pain-points most contact centers experience is abandon rates - callers who simply get tired of waiting for an available agent to service their call, and disconnect. The result is that the customer is dissatisfied with the experience, and the contact center experiences an abandoned call - calls that drop from the queue. The caller's intention was never satisfied, and the caller may, or may never call back.

The largest complaints callers have with regards to call centers is waiting on hold for an excessive period of time or navigating through an endless phone menu with hard-to-follow/lengthy prompts. In fact, social media is filled with sites that consumers can voice their criticisms: On hold with.

This problem is further compounded by organizations who have IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and ACD (Automated Call Distribution) technologies but only use the ACD component in combination with simple rules to route calls to agents. These shortcuts are often because of the costs or challenges associated with deploying.

Like most Cisco Unified Communications customers with the need to support some form of contact center within their organizations, you may have most likely deployed Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX), or perhaps its big brothers Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (PCCE) or Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE). And again, like most Cisco contact center deployments, you have most likely initially focused on the essentials: getting your agents to answer customer calls! Now that this is out of the way, it’s time to take a deeper look under the hood of your Cisco contact center platform and realize its true potential: it can completely transform how you interact with your customers.

Although PCCE and UCCE platforms are great, this article will focus on UCCX. With the capacity to support 400 agents and as many concurrent IVR ports, UCCX fits most small and medium-sized organizations. At its core, it consists of four main modules all within the same box: an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) engine, a set of applications for Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), and a Reporting platform. At first glance, this may all seem relatively standard. However, what sets UCCX apart is its flexibility; at Stack8, we consider UCCX to be closer to a Telephony Application Development platform than a contact center product.